All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Britain already has the worst post-pandemic workforce recovery in Europe. New figures out today show the problem is getting even worse. The number of those ‘economically inactive’ (not in work or looking for it) rose by a remarkable 150,000 in the last three months to 9.4 million – equivalent to the adult population of Portsmouth
Sydney has been rocked by another stabbing rampage – just days after six people were murdered in a knife attack in the city’s Bondi Junction. A bishop of the Assyrian Orthodox Church, Mar Mari Emmanuel, was knifed at the altar during the incident yesterday afternoon in the working-class suburb of Wakeley. Several other parishioners were
The few days since the publication of the Cass report – the probe into ‘gender identity’ services for young people – have been a revelation. The report, compiled by Dr Hilary Cass, has at long last, and so publicly it couldn’t be ignored, blown some of the gilt off the trans gingerbread, confirming that medical interventions on minors weren’t backed up by
It has been a long time since the West dominated shipbuilding, or steel making. We are already aware that we are losing ground in consumer goods, as well as in finance and transport. Add it all up, and we no longer expect the US, Europe or its allies to control the global market in most
Lloyd Russell-Moyle, Labour MP for Brighton Kemptown, received a rather humiliating dressing down in the Commons today. His ticking off followed the Health Secretary’s statement on Dr Hilary Cass’s report into gender services. During his intervention, a holier-than-thou Russell-Moyle welcomed the report for moving the discussion on but claimed that his reading of the review
Is it Dozy Don now? Social media is already pulsating over reports that Donald Trump appears to have fallen asleep on the first day of his criminal trial. ‘His head keeps dropping down and his mouth goes slack’, says the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman. Oh boy. ‘72 hours until all hell breaks loose!’ declared
Rishi Sunak wants this weekend’s attempt by Iran to attack Israel to mark a de-escalation in the region. He told MPs this afternoon that he would be speaking to Benjamin Netanyahu later today and that he would be discussing how to prevent further escalation, saying: ‘All sides must show restraint.’ This was not a surprise,
Uh oh. The Prime Minister hasn’t been back from Easter recess for one full day yet and he’s already facing bad news. In the latest poll of Tory party members by ConservativeHome, Rishi Sunak’s net satisfaction rating has dropped to a new low of, er, -27.7. In fact, Sunak is the least popular member of
She’s back. Liz Truss is in the headlines once more this week ahead of tomorrow’s publication of her book Ten Years to Save the West. Part memoir, part cri de coeur, it tells the tale of her ten years in government and the lessons she learned about being, in her words, ‘the only conservative in
In the wake of the Cass Report’s damning verdict on the reckless ‘social transitioning’ of children and the prescribing of puberty blockers to minors, it’s perhaps an apt time to recall a mini-series that appeared on ITV a few years ago cheerleading for both. Butterfly was broadcast in October 2018 just as Theresa May’s national consultation
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It’s 18 months since Liz Truss left Downing Street and her new memoir, Ten Years to Save the West, is out. She gave her first interview to Fraser Nelson on Spectator TV, covering why she wants to abolish the Supreme Court, Donald Trump, her husband’s warning that her leadership bid would end in tears, and
Eighteen months have passed since Liz Truss left Downing Street and after an initial period of silence, she has been making up for lost time. In recent months, Truss has tabled a bill in parliament, launched her own ‘Popular Conservatism’ movement and even done the lecture circuit in the US. And now, at last, the
Well, it’s nice to feel on trend. The Today programme this morning carried an item on the popularity of one-man and one-woman theatre shows, following on from the success of two such shows in the Olivier Awards: Sarah Snook in The Picture of Dorian Gray and Andrew Scott in Vanya. Only in passing did they
The Iranian drone and missile attacks of 13 April brought less drama for many in Jerusalem than one might have imagined. War brings with it the disappearance of expectations of daily continuity, or of a reasonable and logical sequence of events. It has been wartime for six months now here in Jerusalem; in another way it
For my thirteenth birthday, which coincided roughly with my Bat Mitzvah (the Jewish ceremony for entering adulthood), I had begged for – and got – my own phone line. This was so that I could talk for hours on the phone to friends I had seen all day, or possibly all weekend if they were
‘You got a win. Take the win.’ This is reportedly what US President Joe Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a phone call following the thwarting of Iran’s Saturday night aerial barrage by Israel and a US-led coalition including Jordan and the United Kingdom. Tehran launched 170 drones, 120 ballistic missiles and 30
This weekend, the Islamic Republic of Iran launched an unprecedented attack against Israel. For the first time since 1979, Iran’s leadership launched strikes from Iranian territory at Israel proper using more than 300 drones and missiles, with the vast majority shot down. In the handful of cases where Biden has responded militarily, it has been mostly aimed
Early on the morning of 1 December 2022, 50 helmeted and body-armoured National Crime Agency officers and a media relations officer burst into Athlone House, my home in Highgate, north London. They seized telephones and computers and issued a derogatory press release. The police could not name me, but pictures of the inside of my
All eyes are on the Middle East this week following Iran’s attack against Israel on Saturday night. Nearly all of the 300 drones, cruise and ballistic missiles fired at Israel were stopped by the country’s air defences. The UK, US and Jordan also helped protect Israel during the attack. Since the bombardment, the line from
The question of how Israel will respond to Iran’s attack dominated David Cameron’s first broadcast round since he became Foreign Secretary last year. Immediately condemning Iran’s attack as a ‘very, very dangerous act in an already dangerous world’ on BBC Breakfast, Cameron added that ‘fortunately, it was a failure’. The Foreign Secretary told LBC’s Nick
Iran’s attack on Israel signals a new era. For the first time, Iran targeted Israel directly, not only through proxies – and not in a way that leaves room for deniability in order to limit Israeli reprisal. The attack on Saturday night, in response to the killing of two Iranian generals in Damascus by Israel,
Parliament’s return from recess this week means the Rwanda Bill is now back in the Commons for the final game of ping pong. Rwanda has previously dominated the news agenda whenever it is debated in parliament. But this week it is expected – by both supporters and opponents of the scheme – to feature far
Emmanuel Macron told a communist newspaper earlier this year that he didn’t consider Marine le Pen’s National Rally part of the ‘Republican arc’. By extension, the French president presumably thinks the same of the 13,288,686 million men and women who voted for Le Pen in the second round of the 2022 presidential election. In the
Most of us are, I think, temperamentally opposed to the idea of a society in which we are surveilled 24/7. We look at the proliferation of Ring doorbells, the thickets of CCTV cameras that capture our every trip to the shop from multiple angles, the algorithmic harvesting of our data by every website we use
On Sunday morning, Israelis – those who hadn’t already spent part of the night in bomb shelters or safe rooms, unable to sleep – woke up to the good news that nearly all of the approximately 300 missiles and drones fired from Iran hours earlier had been destroyed before crossing into Israeli airspace. One Israeli
Today was supposed to be the day we sent our kids back to nursery. For two weeks, my toddler and baby have been home with a nasty stomach bug that turned out to be shigella, a bacterium that causes dysentery and that has been ripping through Israeli troops in Gaza. Then, on Saturday night, Rear Admiral
Iran’s strike on Israel yesterday is, simultaneously, a moment for alarm and calm. Alarm because, by unleashing more than 300 drones, cruise and ballistic missiles in response to Israel’s attack on its Damascus consulate at the start of the month, Iran is basically saying: we can do this every time Israel or its allies cross
Conflict in the Middle East entered a new dangerous phase on Saturday night, as Iran launched over 300 drones and missiles against Israel, its first direct military attack against the country after years of shadow warfare. On the BBC this morning, Health Secretary Victoria Atkins told Laura Kuenssberg this was an ‘incredibly significant attack’. She
The rusting and disintegrating hulk of a former Second World War landing ship has become an unlikely but dangerous flashpoint in US-China relations. The Sierra Madre, built for the US navy to land tanks, has for several decades been stranded on a shoal in the South China Sea. But now it has become a symbol of Beijing’s growing aggression in the region
Iran’s overnight mass drone attack on Israel was supposed to be payback for the assassination of Iranian Republican Guard Corps commander General Mohammad Reza Zahedi. In truth, though, it was a tepid, face-saving response which the ayatollahs in Tehran knew would fail. In the early hours of this morning, the Iranian army described what it
Some 300 missiles and drones were dispatched by Iran towards Israel last night, the largest such assault in history. The IDF say 99 per cent of them were shot down by the air forces of Israel, the UK, US and Jordan. So rather than weaken Israel, Iran’s attack has ended up convening showcasing an extraordinary
When the Irish foreign minister Micheal Martin recently stood up and announced to the Dail that Ireland would officially recognise a Palestinian state ‘within a matter of weeks’, there were no sharp intakes of breath or fits of fainting in the chamber. Irish political parties have long been relatively united in their calls for full
The recent news that comedian Frank Skinner had been sacked from his job at Absolute Radio after fifteen years as presenter feels like a misstep to say the least. It has not been without a whiff of scandal, coming amidst accusations of ‘ageism’. The man himself lamented: ‘I’m not going to pretend I took it
Iran’s drone and missile attack on Israel is an escalation from the fiery but ultimately empty rhetoric we are used to from Tehran. In different times and with a different prime minister in Jerusalem than the gun-shy Benjamin Netanyahu, it is the kind of inflammatory move that could have provoked a much graver Israeli response
